Monday, May 2, 2011

In this unique presentation, freelance wildlife photographer and writer Scott Linstead will discuss his philosophy on creating wildlife imagery. Although Scott stradles both the traditional and high-tech camps in his photographic endeavours, the technical, biological and ethical subtleties of high speed and camera trap photography will be examined in particular. Get a peek behind the curtain at the massive technical undertakings of his most published images and hear a firsthand account on the realities of publishing natural history photography for a living.

Monday, March 14, 2011

The NANPA summit for 2011 has come and gone. I joined John Nicol, engineer for Highspeedflash, at the UK company's kiosk. As so many serious amateurs and pros try to extract free hardware from companies in exchange for promises of "exposure", I was very pleased to have have solidified my association with HighSpeedFlash through a critical sale. A client who had witnessed the marvels of HighSpeedFlash's Pro Unit at one of my workshops showed up at the kiosk at purchased two Pro units. I feel that this tangible result of my promotional efforts lends some credibility to my status as a figure in the world of high speed wildlife photography.

Recognition from NGS editor

Karine Aigner, senior photo editor at National Geographic Kids, gave a presentation called "How to Get My Attention". It was a pragmatic look at what not to do when submitting photographic material to a world class publication. Karine looked at her own images, tearing them apart in search of faults, both technical and qualitative. She then presented series of three images addressing the same subject. Three images of elephants shown in order of increasing subjective quality illustrated the superiority of one image over another in terms of lighting, pose, perspective, lens choice and even shutter speed. Aigner wanted us to be able to evaluate our own images relative to what already exists on the market; showing an editor a solid 7.5/10 is meaningless if an abundance of 9/10s are already available at the major agencies.

So, with the non-sugar-coated nature of this presentation in mind, when the time came for Karine to show us a few images that she felt were beyond reproach, I was elated that the first image displayed was my osprey-catches-trout shot from the front cover of my book Decisive Moments. A subdued, collective gasp from the crowd was the icing on the cake, Although it is barely audible in the cellphone video below.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Once again, a northern hawk owl has taken up residence in southern Quebec for the winter. My passion for such subjects has diminished over the years as I have redirected my work away from avian subjects. Still, under certain circumstances, I can be convinced to revisit a classic subject. Any owl image is elevated by snow flakes. And when it comes to telephoto lenses and their strong isolation effect, I enjoy two-tone backgrounds that can be suggestive of habitat. In this case, the dark conifers on the top half of the background serve a secondary purpose of highlighting the snowflakes.